David Možný

David Možný works mainly with video and video installation. He has also worked as a VJ and projectionist for theatre performances and scenic readings. In precise computer animations he assembles the reality emerging from photographs of architecture (Rahova), from offset printed shots of interiors from ideal home magazines (Virtual Soul Waste) or from archaic dictionary illustrations (Slowly).

By refashioning urban and social utopias and stylised environments, he comments on their anachronistic qualities and slow dissolution and achieves an unsettlingly catastrophic effect. Similarly to the principles of computer games, he creates models of space that operate by virtue of the tension between reality and software construction. The fluid movement of film shots returns the temporal element to photography and drawings and disturbs their staticity.

Video for Možný represents the interaction of sound and image, and footage is often directly mapped onto the structure of music. He is interested in a utopian vision materialised in urbanism and architecture of the eastern bloc and the related environment separating itself from the logic of reality and emerging and existing over and above the natural framework of time and space.

The first of Možný’s video installations was the simultaneous double projection Heterotopie (2001), in which the view of a travelling train provokes a similar feeling of vertigo to the cameras aimed at shelves in Tesco hypermarkets that we see in the video Shopping, whose two adjacent projections are supplemented in the gallery by a lightbox – Serotonin – with a shot of the depopulated space of the vast shop: the perfect embodiment of the heterotopic separation beyond time and space.

In Virtual Soul Waste for the group Naše věc, photographs from Romanian magazines on architecture and housing from the 1970s are set in motion. The digitalised offset prints of empty, sterile interiors evoke nostalgia (or ostalgia) and a feeling of post-apocalyptic desolation. By interrogating the opposition exterior/interior, Možný removes the security from a clearly defined space and creates an image of an abstract, uninhabitable environment.

Rahova was created as a gallery installation and independent video based on Možný’s fascination with the housing estates in the Bucharest neighbourhood of that name, which he scanned with handheld camera and then processed in a graphics program. During the process of decay, the prefab buildings reveal their structure, and their movement in the video is basically a commentary on this process. The movements of architecture, symbiotically connected to the music of Michal Mariánek, appear real thanks to the precise manipulation of depth of field and movement of the virtual camera. The architectural features of the housing estate are generative in the same way as the deconstructed architecture in the video. The buildings themselves inhabit the space of the estate, move in space, and replace their absent or invisible inhabitants. In the gallery installation a three-channel video follows the claustrophobic entrance room filled with anonymous mailboxes and illuminated with flashing fluorescent lamps creating an atmosphere of cramped residential interiors.

The video Slowly was created for a song by the Brno-based band Vítrholc. It comprises a set of hallucinogenic images from the illustrated Russian-German dictionary Duden from the 1950s. The animated pen-and-ink drawings and the dreamy music and Japanese subtitles create an autonomously surreal world.

Participation on festivals and projections:

2011

Big Cartoon Festival, Moskva

INDEX Festival, New York

37. Letní filmová škola Uherské Hradiště

Imaginative Geographies, Atlantis 11, Biennale di Venezia

2010

PAF – Přehlídka animovaného filmu, sekce Jiné vize, Vítězný snímek a Cena diváků, Olomouc

2009

Internationales Trickfilm Festival – International Festival of Animated Film, Stuttgart

2006

Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

2005

Out Video Festival, 30 sec. movies for outdoor screens, Jekatěrinburg

2004

Onedotzero, ICA, London

Bitfilm, Hamburg, 1. cena

Animago, Stuttgart, 2. cena

Kaleidoskop, Barcelona

FACT, Liverpool

2002

COOP 02, Kalinderu Media Lab, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest